In Spreading The Iran WMD Hoax, Tulsi Gabbard Becomes The Next Colin Powell.

Just As Colin Powell (and Benjamin Netanyahu) did before Iraq, Tulsi Gabbard Is Spreading Fake Intelligence To Manufacture Consent For War With Iran.

A Lazy Campaign Of Manufacturing Consent

Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, who once portrayed herself as an anti-war figure skeptical of official intelligence deceptions, has turned into the exact thing she used to oppose, in selling fake intelligence to manufacture consent for a war with Iran, which she used to say “would make the Iraq War look like a cakewalk”.

Previously, Gabbard had correctly stated that “the intelligence community continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.

When repeatedly asked by the press about this, Donald Trump said “she’s wrong,” referring to Tulsi Gabbard’s statement.

At the behest of her boss, Donald Trump, Gabbard took to X and said:

The dishonest media is intentionally taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division. America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly. President Trump has been clear that can’t happen, and I agree.

In reality, as writer Caitlin Johnstone noted, “Gabbard accompanied this text with a video clip of her congressional testimony in March, which in no way validates anything she says in her post. Nowhere in the clip does she utter anything about Iran being weeks to months from a nuclear weapon”.

In fact the clip of Gabbard is just her reading verbatim from the American intelligence community's annual threat assessment report from March of this year.

Nowhere in the report does it say anything about Iran being “weeks to months from a nuclear weapon,” only that the conversation about Iran getting a nuclear weapon has become more mainstream, but that Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has continued to oppose it.

The full assessment states:

We continue to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003, though pressure has probably built on him to do so. In the past year, there has been an erosion of a decades-long taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public that has emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision making apparatus. Khamenei remains the final decision maker over Iran’s nuclear program, to include any decision to develop nuclear weapons.

Far from being “weeks to months away”, CNN reported that even if Iran did decide to pursue Nuclear Weapons, it would take years before it actually acquired one.

The report wrote that according to the U.S. intelligence, “not only was Iran not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon, it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing”.

Even the head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, when asked by journalist Christiane Amanpour about this assessment, said, “We do not have proof of a systematic effort (by Iran) to move into a Nuclear Weapon”.

The Most Unreliable Source.

Indeed, the only source for the claim that Iran has authorized in support of moving towards a Nuclear Weapon and was “weeks to months away” from building one is Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Mossad.

Israel and Netanyahu’s public claims are notoriously unreliable, almost always cooked up to justify foreign policy goals and whitewash Israeli war crimes.

The former chief of staff to Colin Powell, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, has said, “I never, never ever believe Israeli figures, I’ve been in the government too long to know that the Israelis are patent liars. In their intelligence community, in their propaganda community certainly, and in their leadership, they are inveterate liars”.

Indeed, this is not Benjamin Netanyahu’s first time spreading a WMD deception used to justify war.

In the Wall Street Journal, Benjamin Netanyahu wrote an article in 2002 titled “The Case for Toppling Saddam (Hussien)”.

In the article, he spread the WMD deception used to justify the war in Iraq a year later, writing:

Two decades ago it was possible to thwart Saddam's nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation. Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do. Saddam's nuclear program has changed. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs. He can produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country -- and Iraq is a very big country. Even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover these portable manufacturing sites of mass death.

Again in 2002, in a testimony to Congress, Netanyahu said, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and working towards the development of Nuclear Weapons”.

While out of power at the time, Israeli intelligence, along with British and American intelligence, cooked up the WMD deception used to launch the Iraq War.

In 2002, CBS News wrote, “Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday.”

The outlet noted, “Israeli intelligence officials have gathered [ie, fabricated] evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, said Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin.”

The outlet wrote, “‘Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose,’ Gissin said. ‘It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction’”.

During the genocide in Gaza, Israeli intelligence fabricated an endless array of crudely staged intelligence deceptions used to justify war crimes.

As the Committee to Protect Journalists uncovered, Israel fabricated a number of documents with obvious errors that claimed journalists working in Gaza were part of Hamas, in order to justify targeting and killing them for reporting on the ground on Israel’s war crimes.

CNN found that the IDF planted weapons at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza to make it seem like it was a Hamas command centre in order to justify bombing it.

Israel deployed an endless array of crudely staged intelligence deception in an attempt to claim Al-Shifa was a Hamas command center.

As journalist Jeremy Scahill noted :

After Initially claiming that Al-Shifa Hospital was effectively Hamas’s Pentagon — a narrative publicly bolstered by the Biden administration — the IDF released its first round of purported evidence, which more or less consisted of a smattering of automatic rifles, some nestled behind an MRI machine, and a conveniently placed combat vest with a Hamas logo on it. With the exception of Israel’s most die-hard supporters, this effort appeared to convince almost no one of the sweeping assertions about Al-Shifa’s importance to Hamas’s current operations. After all, the IDF had already shown the public a slick 3D video model purporting to be a depiction of an advanced underground command and control lair used by Hamas. So Israel’s first effort at selling the case fell flat

As for Iran, Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence have deployed an endless array of deceptions over the years in an attempt to “prove” Iran was weeks away from acquiring the bomb.

Israeli and American intelligence, going back as far as 1995, has falsely claimed that “Iran is much closer to producing nuclear weapons than previously thought, and could be less than five years away from having an atomic bomb”.

In 2005, even Israel’s former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Uzi Eilam, said that “I am not sure that Iran wants the bomb” and said “Netanyahu and other politicians have struck terrible, unnecessary fear into the hearts of the Israeli public” and that “Netanyahu is using the Iranian threat to achieve a variety of political objectives”.

Netanyahu and Israeli intelligence have also created a number of fake documents intended to inflame the “Iranian Nuclear Threat”.

Netanyahu has claimed to have obtained a series of internal Iranian documents proving they plan on building a Nuclear Weapon.

But as investigative journalist Gareth Porter has shown, the documents were fabricated by the Mossad.

One particular document that Netanyahu likes to point to purports to show “a set of technical drawings of efforts to fit what appears to be a nuclear payload into the reentry vehicle of Iran’s medium-range ballistic missile, the Shahab-3”.

The Document, however, as Porter has found, “turns out to have a fatal flaw: the drawings depict a reentry vehicle that had already been abandoned by the Iranian missile programme in favour of an improved model”.

The proof that the document was fabricated was that the “Shahab-3” model shown in the document was already abandoned by Iran by the time of its purported date of April 2003. As Porter found:

The reentry vehicle or warhead shown in the schematics had the familiar “dunce cap” shape of the original North Korean No Dong missile, an IPS investigation has confirmed. But when Iran had flight-tested a new missile in mid-2004, it did not have that “dunce cap” warhead but a new “triconic” or “baby bottle” shape, which was more aerodynamic than the one on the original Iranian missile.

The development of the new missile and warhead had already been under way for years by that time, according to the author of the most authoritative study of the Iranian missile programme.

The schematics are dated March and April 2003, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report of May 2008. But according to Mike Elleman, lead author of the study published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) last May, Iran had been introducing the new warhead shape, along with other major innovations in the design of the medium-range missile, over a period of two to five years.

Elleman confirmed in an interview with IPS that the redesign of the reentry vehicle must have begun in 2002 at the latest.

The former head of the Safeguards Department of the IAEA, Olli Heinonen, who managed the IAEA investigation of the intelligence documents on Iran, confirmed in an interview with IPS that the schematics depicted in the documents were of the old No Dong Missile rather than the new missile that was tested in mid-2004.

The Mossad, however, did not know that Iran had improved the design and fabricated the document using the wrong model.

As Gareth Porter wrote :

According to Michael Elleman, the author of the most definitive account of the Iranian missile program, as early as 2000, Iran’s Defense Ministry had begun developing an improved version of the Shahab-3 with a reentry vehicle boasting a far more aerodynamic “triconic baby bottle” shape – not the “dunce-cap” of the original.

As Elleman told this writer, however, foreign intelligence agencies remained unaware of the new and improved Shahab missile with a very different shape until it took its first flight test in August 2004. Among the agencies kept in the dark about the new design was Israel’s Mossad. That explains why the false documents on redesigning the Shahab-3 – the earliest dates of which were in 2002, according to an unpublished internal IAEA document – showed a reentry vehicle design that Iran had already discarded.

When Netanyahu was pushing Trump to pull out of the JCPOA (Iran deal) he claimed to have found “50,000 pages of secret nuclear files from Tehran”.

Experts again believed that these documents were fabricated. As Gareth Porter noted in the Grayzone:

Not one contained the official markings of the relevant Iranian agency.

Tariq Rauf, who was head of the Verification and Security Policy Coordination Office at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 2001 to 2011, told The Grayzone that these markings were practically ubiquitous on official Iranian files.

‘Iran is a highly bureaucratized system,’ Rauf explained. ‘Hence, one would expect a proper book-keeping system that would record incoming correspondence, with date received, action officer, department, circulation to additional relevant officials, proper letterhead, etc.’

But as Rauf noted, the ‘nuclear archive’ documents that were published by the Washington Post bore no such evidence of Iranian government origin. Nor did they contain other markings to indicate their creation under the auspices of an Iranian government agency.

Yet again, Gabbard’s new intelligence assessment is almost certainly coming from Benjamin Netanyahu and is certainly bogus.

Gabbard Playing Colin Powell’s Role.

Under the George W Bush administration, Colin Powell sold the WMD deception at the United Nations to justify the war in Iraq.

Now, Gabbard is playing the same role, attempting to sell a far more crude deception, reversing the claim that she and the entirety of the U.S. intelligence made just months ago, and actively lying about what she and the DNI report actually said.

Furthermore, Gabbard-or at least the person she was pretending to be at the time- knows full well that Trump and Netanyahu want to get into a war with Iran and that the war will be destructive.

In 2019, she tweeted, “Trump says he doesn't want war with Iran, but that's exactly what he wants, because that's exactly what Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu, al-Qaeda, Bolton, Haley, and other NeoCons/NeoLibs want. That’s what he put first--not America.”

Again in 2019, she tweeted, “Trump's shortsighted foreign policy is bringing us to the brink of war with Iran and allowing Iran to accelerate its nuclear program—just to please the Saudis and Netanyahu. This is not America first.”

She also tweeted, “Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia want to drag the United States into war with Iran, and Trump is submitting to their wishes. The cost in money and lives will be catastrophic”.

Now, these tweets are just as true, and Gabbard is now on the side of Trump and Netanyahu, pushing fabrications used to justify the war she used to claim to oppose.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber.